The Christmas victor? (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)
Buzzfeed have called the Christmas Tablet Wars for Apple. Data mining Twitter was their real world test (as opposed to something a little bit more rigorous which would take a little longer). By looking for the phrase "First tweet from…" and then picking up on the name of the hardware afterwards, they could rank the newest tablets out there, and the iPad scored the highest.
It was almost four times more popular that the three other tablets they looked for. With 1795 tweets for Apple's device, compared to 250 tweets for Kindle, 100 tweets for the Nexus 7, and 36 tweets for Surface RT, that's almost four times more popular than the combined total of the rivals.
As noted, this is far from accurate. It requires very precise language to be picked up (so "New iPad Mini! First Tweet!" may not be counted), the new users must be happy to tweet about their hardware, and arguably they need to be Twitter users in the first place. But it's a comprehensive victory.
Given the vagaries of sales figures put out by the companies in their quarterly reports, the estimates from Market Research firms, and the analysis of third hand data from ad servicing partners and freemium game developers, Buzzfeed's method is not as far into the land of 'really, you'll trust that?' as some other methods.
I'm happy to look at other figures as they come out, but right now I'm going to go with Buzzfeed's call, if not the relative shares, of the Christmas tablet market.
No comments:
Post a Comment